Rainy Day – Illustration

Once again I pieced a little character together. This time by assignment.

Rainy Day

As the weather is rather alternating at the moment – thanks, I got a cold again – I thought this picture would fit perfectly into the season and to the character. Of course, we got the assignment to create a lanky Illustrator character some months prior, but I could foresee that we would finish this assignment somewhere around March or April.

And so it happened to be – beware, this picture comes fresh off my digital desktop!

Development

I don’t know what draws me towards green, frog-like characters, but here we have another one. I liked idea of a puppet-like character with joints, because we actually had to design a figure that would work in a walk-cycle. As I had a bad experience, with quite an equal assignment by the same teacher last year (?), I decided to make it as simply as possible for myself.

So, long arms, long legs and visible joints to make turning limbs super-easy were a must.

The boots were my – non-orginal ;P – idea and the detailed hands, as well as the texturing, were suggested by another teacher. And I must say, I kinda like how it turned out; the clash of artificial plastic boots with the organic appeal of the characters body works rather well for me.

On the point of texture – the basic forms and colors of the character were done in Illustrator and the texturing was later applied in Photoshop with a clipping mask. In case you wondered. 😉

Illustration – The Idea behind it

As I already mentioned, I really liked the idea of the rubber boots – as childish as it might be. So as we got told to make an illustration including our previous character, I just had to come up with the idea of my nameless character looking sadly at a too-small-to-jump-into puddle, while the rest of the picture is blazing with rain. Why there’s only one puddle forming that’s too small for the character to jump in and enjoy themselves? Irony? Sadism? Yeah, I guess all of the former, as my humor is rather cruel. 😉

By the way if you interpreted the picture differently, you’re not alone. The teacher looking over it, had a completely different idea about it, which was just as legit, but showed that his mind wasn’t a mean and evil as mine. ;P It was something in the way of the character seeing their kingdom slowly vanish before their very own eyes. That’s pretty sad.

If you have any other interpretation of the picture – let me know. 🙂 I love such little stories. 😀